“NOOO!” Wailing, Emma fell into the glass, or maybe it was the mirror that rushed for her fast, and then faster.…
LIZZIE
Mom Makes Her Mistake
THE FOG—HER DAD, the whisper-man, the energy of the Peculiars all tangled together—rushes for them, fast and then faster and faster, swallowing trees, gobbling up the sky. The fog is not a wall but a roiling mass like the relentless churn of a tornado, and very fast, much faster than they are. Lizzie knows they’ll lose this race. In fact, she’s counting on it.
But Mom doesn’t understand and would never agree if she did. So she tries. Her mother will not give up. She is brave, so brave, and screaming now, not at that fog but their car: “Come on, you piece of shit, come on!” Teeth bared, the cords standing in her neck, her mother is defiant, determined, enraged, and she has never been more beautiful. Through her terror, through whatever else is to come, Lizzie’s heart swells with pride and love, and she grabs hold of this one clear thought: she will always remember the moment when her mother tried to save them.
I have to be brave; be as brave as Mom, as the kids in Dad’s books. As brave as Dad.
Their car leaps forward, and then they are vaulting, storming down the road, the woods whizzing to a blur. They are traveling much too quickly for this road, which twists and turns and climbs and drops—and still the fog is remorseless, a ravening white monster.
Come on, Lizzie thinks, urging it on. Hurry up, come on, come on, want me, want me! Her whole body burns, screams with the need to finish the Now, finish the Now, finish it. Behind her, the symbols for her special forever-Now purple the air; they are so strong they snap and crackle as if the world were electric. Her hand is on fire. The best symbol, the most powerful and the one she must draw if the forever-Now is to work, begs to come into being. The Sign of Sure is so strong, the path it will blaze through the Dark Passages so brilliant, that Lizzie’s head is a hot bright ball, like a sun a second away from exploding into a supernova.
Wait. She grits her teeth as tears of pain and grief squeeze from the corners of her eyes. Wait, wait until it’s got us, wait until I feel it, until the very last—
They rocket over a rise. Her stomach drops away as the car leaves the road and then smashes to earth with a sudden, loud bam. The front tires explode. Something—the fender—catches. Sparks swarm past Lizzie’s window like fireflies. The car fishtails wildly, the rear skidding left …
And this is when Mom makes her mistake. Without slowing, Mom stiff-arms the wheel and wrenches it too far.
“No, no, no!” her mother shouts as the car fishtails. She fights the wheel, but this time, the centrifugal force is too great and they spin out of control.
Lizzie’s forehead slams against her window. The pain is immense and erupts like a bomb. Her vision sheets first red and then glare-white. Something breaks in her head and tears, and then her hair is wet and warm. The car swerves left, and her head jerks right, snapping on the stalk of her neck. Another sharp crack as her head connects with glass again, and then the window has imploded in a shower of pebbly safety glass. They are spinning, whirling like a top, the world beyond dissolving into a crazy blur, going faster than any carousel. Even with her shoulder harness, Lizzie is pinned against the car door, momentum jamming her in place, crushing her like a bug. Through a red haze, she sees the trees racing for them, the trunks growing huge in the windshield.
Screaming, Lizzie throws up her arms and
EMMA
Between the Lines
1
BLINK.
I’m still in the house. Pulse thundering, Emma inched her head left, saw a procession of doors, and then looked to her right. Through a bright rectangle of yellow light, she made out the front door, the braided rug, gleaming hardwood. Blank white walls. Downstairs again. I’m in that hall I saw from the foyer.
The air in this hall was brain-freeze cold, bad enough to set her teeth and steam her breath, but her right hand was on fire. Steeling herself, she turned her hand palm up and inspected her skin in the gloom. No burns, no blisters, no marks, not even a scratch. She flexed her fingers, curled them into a fist. Everything seemed to work.
What had she just seen in that last blink? “A crash,” she said. “Lizzie was in a car with her mother, and she crashed.”
She dragged her eyes up to look straight ahead at a very strange door. It was not made of any kind of wood she recognized. It wasn’t even a proper door. This door was a long slit, just wide enough to allow a single person to pass through, and as glare-white as the snow, as the sky around the sun at high noon on a hot summer’s day. As one of Jasper’s canvases, come to think of it.
She realized something else. I’ve seen this before, too. The color was dead wrong, but the shape was right. That smoky-black mirror that Lizzie’s father had in his barn was a slit, too.
“The Dickens Mirror,” she murmured, and frowned. What was that about? Dickens was … you know … überfamous. And so? They’d read Great Expectations in tenth grade—not a bad book; Havisham was a trip, like Dickens read Brontë and decided to bring the crazy lady out of the attic—and A Tale of Two Cities (total snooze). For a while there, before she was sent away to school, she had Dickens coming out of her eyeballs because of Jasper and all those tapes. They might have listened to a biography or two. No, make that a definite. Jasper had the old Dickens bio by Forster, and maybe another, more recent. And hadn’t there been something about mirrors in that one? That was right. Dickens had scads of mirrors, all through his house, in his study, everywhere. She even remembered why: when he was a kid and his dad had gone to debtor’s prison, Dickens had been forced to work in a gloomy, dank blacking factory. As an adult and even though he walked the nights away through the warren of London’s alleys and the sewers coursing through the city’s underbelly, Dickens hated darkness. He’d filled the rooms of his many homes with mirrors to bring in and magnify the light. So had there been a very special, very peculiar mirror? She just didn’t know, and she couldn’t remember a single Dickens story that revolved around a mirror.
So it’s probably not something Dickens made up. Could he have had a mirror made, or just found it somewhere? The guy went a gajillion places, climbed mountains, nearly killed himself getting to the top of Vesuvius, walked everywhere, wandered around the worst of London’s slums with some inspector. Ten to one, there were places Dickens visited where he’d have had tons of mirrors to choose from—or had he ever gone looking for one very particular mirror? And then Lizzie’s dad ends up with it? Her memory for blinks was always a little hazy, but what she did recall was an argument between Lizzie’s parents. They stole it? That felt right. They’d tracked down the mirror and stolen other things, too. But what, and why?